


Choose To Listen

by featherxquill



Category: Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-31
Updated: 2011-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-23 07:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherxquill/pseuds/featherxquill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are reasons why Lord Marshal cannot bring himself to kill one stranded elemental. They have something to do with a foretelling more than thirty years old, and the woman who made it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choose To Listen

_Elementals, we calculate._

She lifts chained wrists, and those blue eyes pierce his. It is as if he can see right through them like clear water, but still he knows nothing about her. Equal amounts of depth and frivolity within them, so he can never read her meaning or intentions. She lifts her chin in a way that could be defiant or inviting; the air between them is as thick as honey.

“Is this really necessary, Lord Marshal?”

“I will not make the same mistake again, Aereon.”

“Oh, but you will.”

He doesn’t know quite what she is talking about, and he’s never known quite who she is.

 

 _There are very few of us who have met a Necromonger and lived to speak of it._

She is a breath against his skin, and he cannot stand that. When she stands before him and he demands that she kneel and convert, her laughter is like bells and the wind whips around her so she shimmers before his eyes. She tells him she has calculated, and she knows he will not kill her, because the information she can give him is more valuable than the example he could set by taking her life.

He is a brand new Lord Marshal. She is his first prisoner.

He keeps her in a room that is dark and almost airless. For her it is stifling. When he opens the door and the light spills onto her face, she stares at him and says nothing, and if she weren’t an air Elemental he would have sworn he saw fire in her eyes.

 

 _Destroying entire societies, and yet he can’t he bring himself to kill one stranded Elemental._

When he breathes against her skin, it disappears under his fingers. She whispers his name, not his title but the name he had when he was still just a man, and he pretends it doesn’t reduce him to one once again. He feels like a man now, only he sees her next movement before she makes it with those astral eyes, and she uses that quick mind to know what his will be. Even something as animal and close as this is at the same time a battle.

One evening she tells him she has had a dream, and Elementals don’t have dreams for no reason. She tells him he is going to be killed by a Furyan warrior.

Next morning he feels the wind against his face, dry and cold and from a different direction than yesterday, and he knows without checking that she has escaped.

 

 _It concerns a foretelling, a prediction now more than thirty years old._

Some would say that, for an air Elemental, she knows too much about planting seeds.

Balance is more important than life or death. Elementals have always held the fate of worlds in their hands, and she is no different. She understands that life is cyclical, that there must always be good and evil, destruction and birth.

She ensures that her own prediction will come to pass.

When she sees him die, she remembers just for a moment that fierce embrace; that battle of wills, but it is not in the nature of air to regret.

The convert stabs him and he falls; his eyes seek her out in the crowd. There is the ghost of a smile on her face, and he knows he has made the same mistake again, just as she predicted.

He’s never known who she is, but when he chooses Riddick instead of Vaako, he does it for her, because he realises he’s been doing what she told him to for the last thirty years, and he doesn’t know how to do anything else.


End file.
